Thanks to Bipolar Bear for sharing these words, and these parts of your story: 

thestoryofabipolarbear:

Brown people and their ignorance towards mental illnesses.

This also goes for Muslims Desis.

I will never understand why it’s a shame to be mentally ill.

I don’t get why they feel depression isn’t real and it’s a jinn or something devil-like.

I don’t get why they can’t accept their depression and mental illness and get fucking treatment.

Most of them…(http://thestoryofabipolarbear.tumblr.com/post/13528514672/brown-people-and-their-ignorance-towards-mental)

Thanks for this. read it twice. made me reflect. I’m listening, thinkging.

In addition, it made me reflect just a bit on one tangent (recognizing that I totally can’t speak to your specific experience, and am reflecting more broadly on mental health in all its various incarnations and expressions);

I think brown people’s reactions and dealings with mental illness in the diaspora, denial is certainly an element.

I’d also like to integrate my own witnessing of using this (ultimately unhelpful) approach of downplaying mental illness as tied in some ways to the brown person hustle; “back home” those of us from places of daily violence/civil war, etc, etc, and actively underdeveloped/privatized health systems, integrating mental illness into daily life, into banal retellings of family history (“oh, that’s just unpredictable uncle Pappu who talks to trees”) is, in part, a (limited problematic) way of coping amidst overwhelming poverty of resources. Its not okay, its not helpful, and it can/will/is changing.